Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the social ramifications of the reconfiguration and re-imagination of urban space as they become manifest in city dwellers’ everyday struggles over access to, and appropriation of, a newly built transport terminal in Accra, Ghana.

Paper long abstract:

Ghana's urban bus stations have a reputation to be deficient, dangerous and chaotic sites. Spurred by this perception and framed within an agenda for the modernization and (re)ordering of the country's transport infrastructure, over the past decade Ghana's administrations implemented numerous constructions of top-down planned and centrally-regulated 'transport terminals' in order to supplant the old-established, self-regulated and, in the city planners' conception, untoward stations. Designed for the resolute enforcement of laws and regulations, these newly built stations integrate globally circulating technologies of control, engendering spaces inaccessible for 'unwanted elements' of the old station communities (e.g. hawkers, itinerants, day labourers). While some station dwellers contest the new stations via non-use, others adopted creative practices for circumventing the imposed restrictions and for evading socio-spatial exclusion and therewith connected economic deprivation.

Drawing on ethnographic research on a newly built transport terminal in Accra, this paper examines the social ramifications of the reconfiguration of urban space as they become manifest in the station denizens' everyday practices and struggles. It looks at Ghana's new transport terminals as arenas for the negotiation of rights over the city, in which struggles over agency for urban spatial production and for its (re)imagination are fought out. Local and national policy-makers, backed up by urban planners, civil engineers and international agencies, strive for reconfiguring the urban landscape according to their visions of modernity and 'orderliness'. Quotidian users, in turn, strive for appropriating these reconfigured spaces and thereby partake in the formation of new urban imaginaries through their everyday practices.